By the fifth century c.e. use of the Latin language was widespread within the societies of the western provinces of the Roman empire; its Romance descendants remain the dominant languages over almost all that territory, save Britain and the Rhineland. Yet this came about without any policy on the part of the Romans to impose ‘their’ language on subject peoples. ‘Latinization’ must mean more than just non-native speakers employing Latin where needful, it means them acquiring a sufficient command of the language and its registers for practical use. The ‘Social’ of the title is key to the contributors’ approaches. How did social pressures, both ‘push’ and ‘pull’, work in favour of the acquisition and use of Latin in place of or in addition to local languages? This thought-provoking volume arises from the ERC-funded LatinNow project ‘Latinization of the north-western Roman provinces: sociolinguistics, epigraphy and archaeology’ directed by Alex Mullen. This review will be biased towards arguments and evidence relevant to Britain, but as always placing the island in its wider context improves understanding of it. The principal evidence type is epigraphy on stone, though other sources such as written documents (in which Britain is pleasingly rich) are playing an increasing role. This does, though, mean this is a very male world and women often figure only through evidence created by or for men.
A recurring theme, as Herster notes in her concluding discussion, is the increasing recognition of the place of epichoric (local) languages across the West before Rome and their continuing influence despite the evidential dominance of Latin as a ‘vehicular’ language (lingua franca). So this was a world of bi- or multi-lingualism and the contexts and motives for choosing and combining them, ‘code-switching’, was an everyday practice for many: it was not a case of either Latin or something else. So why and how did Latin (itself rather variable) acquire primacy without direct Roman imposition? One might briefly answer this as: socio-cultural prestige; situational necessity; lingua franca. And how was the language acquired on a spectrum from partial comprehension to formal education?
For socio-cultural prestige, the papers by Beltrán, Meyer and Rochette all point in the same direction, Latin was a language tied to the cultural expectations of being a Roman citizen. Beltrán’s sociolinguistically informed paper shows how the distribution of epigraphy in the West, particularly on stone, closely coincides with that of the incidence of Roman Citizens. It also demonstrates the centrality of cities to the spread of the imperial language, a theme expanded upon by Houten for Iberia. Meyer’s paper shows that Roman law and Latin was also central to being a Citizen, though peregrines could access certain types of action, occasionally in epichoric languages. Rochette argues that though the emperors did not impose the use of Latin they tended to assume a Citizen should operate in Latin as well as in any other tongue: Claudius peevishly deprived someone who could not of his Citizenship. This throws an interesting light on the lack of epigraphy from the civil areas of Britannia, the result simply of the low incidence of Citizenship? It is notable, though, that the military coloniae of Britain show no greatly elevated level of epigraphy.
Situational necessity includes the need to interact with Roman law. But Meyer also discusses other evidence for interaction with legal concepts, for instance the language, almost always Latin, and the legalistic formulations of British ‘curse tablets’. Another context enjoining the use of Latin was the army, the source of most of the stone epigraphy and much of the written documentation in Britannia. The army in the first and second centuries consisted of many Citizens (legionaries) and Citizens-presumptive (auxiliaries) and in the West its written culture was in Latin. But Speidel argues for relatively low levels of literacy amongst the soldiers. Clearly literacy in Latin was a sine qua non for those looking for promotion, and it is their evidence we have, for instance in the Vindolanda tablets. What language/s did the ‘grunts’ or ‘squaddies’ operate in? How were Agricola’s orders transmitted down the chains of command at Mons Graupius? Speidel argues further that too few literate soldiers would have retired, either in-province or to their homelands, to act as a channel of Latinisation. The Batavi of Vindolanda if they retired to the Netherlands archaeologically become pretty much indistinguishable from everyone else. A massive code-switch out of Latin and out of Roman military habitus?
In looking at Latin as a lingua franca, Wilson focuses on how it allowed traders from different language backgrounds to interact, rather as Roman mensuration and coinage allowed common standards. He also draws attention to craftsmen such as the potters of La Graufesenque with their bilingual tally-lists or the miners of Vipasca making provision for the teaching of Latin. Kolb draws attention to the Latinity of the communications networks, especially roads, though her starting-point is the fluvio-maritime site of Colijnsplaat. Cooley looks at the evidence for the use of Latin by traders and others in early London, especially the Bloomberg tablets, though this does look more like situation-dependent use of Latin rather than Latinisation as such.
How was Latin acquired? Epigraphically there are the many alphabetic graffiti and occasional snippets of Vergil suggesting basic literacy, even among those in contact with unfired brick and tile. Wolff looks at evidence for more formal education at primary level (ludi grammatici) and then the artes liberales up to ‘university’ level at Marseille (Agricola), Bordeaux (Ausonius) or the scholae of Autun specifically attacked in the Gallic revolt of 21 c.e. One could also cite the evidence of texts such as the Hermeneumata Pseudodositheana for bilingual language instruction (Latin/Greek). Two papers, those of de Cazanove/Estarán and Wisniewski look at religions, respectively their uses of Latin, either conservatively in ‘paganism’ or as vector of new religious outlooks and practices, Christianity. Wisniewski’s paper takes us into the late empire, where the West seems to be extensively Latinised. But this does point up a structural problem for the authors and editor; they tend to concentrate on the first and second centuries c.e. and the initial spread of Latinity, but there then seems to be a ‘missing middle’ of how Latinisation got from that state to one of (near-)ubiquity. When and how did it widen and deepen its social reach, particularly outside cities?
The book is dedicated to the late J.N. Adams. His Bilingualism and the Latin Language (Cambridge, 2003) opened many eyes to a range of ways in which ‘Roman’ and ‘indigenous’ cultural forms might interact — borrowing, code-switching, pidgins, along with the relative cultural authority of different languages. The editors quite rightly oppose any idea that Latinisation is just a proxy for ‘Romanisation’, which is why archaeologists of Roman Britain need to ‘read, mark, learn and inwardly digest’ this book and its sociolinguistic approaches. These allow for a greater and more subtle range of possibilities for how cultures interacted without direct Roman imposition, and what the motivations for and meanings of these interactions may have been. So there are many more approaches for reading meanings off material culture, allowing for different readings in different contexts and for the likelihood that archaeological evidence may have carried various messages in various circumstances to various users and observers, not just ‘Roman’ and ‘native’. Alex Mullen and her collaborators deserve warm thanks for laying out all these approaches, which now need to be followed up, and not just by sociolinguists.
